Hospice nurses were like ghosts coming and going, tugging me gently around, putting straws to my lips and pillows between my knees and fiddling with my chest port. One said “upsy-daisy” when she turned me over, one had chapped hands, one spoke like Lisa Simpson, but there was no getting to know them. I had to just let it happen. Breathing was easier if I didn’t think about it. Grandma and Grandpa and Robin were nearby, but I guess at a time like this you need one person, and that person was my mother, my amazing, incredible, irreplaceable mother. I couldn’t have gotten through one day of this without her, even though I never knew what her face would be like when she came into the room, or what I could and could not afford to say. I couldn’t say: Being a kid was the best part. It was worth it for that. I couldn’t say: You’ll have to tell Antonio. I couldn’t say: Wow. Can you believe this is what my whole life was leading up to? Because I think my mother was still holding out for good news. My mother did not know how to stop fighting. Maybe mothers never do.

•  •  •

Grandpa. Mom and Grandma. Robin and Mom. They appeared above me, one by one or two together, against fields of swaying stems or with melting edges, and they departed just as suddenly as the pain returned. Every time, it took me by surprise. Who would want to do this to me? Because my body was no longer divided into parts where pain could be confined, it bullied and burned its way through to where I really lived.

“Has she had her twelve o’clock?”

“Now.”

“Turn it on.”

The black screen lit up, filling the room with images and noise.

“Where’s Jack?” I asked in my new thick voice.

“Out there in the crowd.”

“I want to see him. Will I see him?”

“Keep watching. You might.”

I could hear my mother was telling me a white lie. It was all white lies now. The people were colored particles, thousands of them, moving like a huge, slow liquid in the space between the buildings. I was hypnotized by the patterns the liquid made flowing forward. Jump to a stage, with faces below, waiting. The screen back of the stage came to life.

“Look,” said Grandma. “Is that it?”

My mother was behind me on the bed, holding me up.

“That’s it,” said Grandpa.

“An animation by Madeleine Wakefield,” my mother read off the screen, her arms snug around me, her voice vibrating through my back.

My face appeared, towering over the people on the stage, and then filling up our television screen.

“Who’s that?” I said. “Who did that?” The gigantic pencil-drawn me was so familiar, every line and smudge of it, but it seemed as though someone older and smarter than me had made it.